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I have to write here again that there are no official Armbian images for this board (even if Xunlong published an image called "Armbian"). All software related questions should go to the Orange Pi forum.

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I have to write here again that there are no official Armbian images for this board (even if Xunlong published an image called "Armbian"). All software related questions should go to the Orange Pi forum.

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According to the datasheet and schematic battery support is not properly implemented on this board, i.e. there is no charge control MOSFET and no step-up converter to power peripherials that need 5V, so I would not recommend trying to use a battery with this device.

Please note that I saw reports that microSIM slot had incorrect markings and people had to insert the card "backwards" to get it working. Also IMEI is all zeroes so make sure that your mobile operator is not unhappy about it.

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Please note that I saw reports that microSIM slot had incorrect markings and people had to insert the card "backwards" to get it working. Also IMEI is all zeroes so make sure that your mobile operator is not unhappy about it.

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I read this forum quite a while and i'm glad that you're also work on boards in which you're not that much interested. Lots of stuff here is quite a little bit over my skills so where can I contribute to your project to your work? Definitly not in geting software to work. But for those of you who have a 3D-printer I have desinged a small case for the OPI 2G-IOT with holes to the:

Power button

USB

Power supply

3.5mm Jack

SIM Card slot

TF Card slot

Wifi antenna

It's not perfect but should work for most cases. For those of you who are familiar with 3D-Printing there are are some bridging parts which are not that easy to print, but it should work if you use support material (I printed it with PETg which isn't good in printing bridging but I was to lazy to change the filament and I use PETg for most of my other projects). In my opinion it would look much better if you Print it with PLA. The walls are thin enough that you can plug in the power supply. There are some holes for screwing the board on the bottom part of the case but i never tested it (something like m2 screws ~4-5mm long should work). Since there was no 3D-file of the board available I had to redrawn it from scratch and therefore some of the dimensions do of course not 100% fit with the board but from what I saw, the holes are big enough to remove everything while the board is in the case.
The STL-File for printing it is added to this post. Let me know if you have some improvements for the case.

I observed that the SOC gets quite hot when I pluged in only the power supply without any SD-card (just tiped the finger on it without any proper measurement, but for shure more than 55°C). Is this normal? Since this is not high priority project to me, I don't know which temperatures are normal for the SOC.

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The machine doesn't boot properly with 16GB SD cards because of lack of power (it is not because the card could be damaged or something similar). So, 8G class 10 must be used instead (it seems that as larger the card, bigger the consumption). What I don't know is if this is a hardware design limitation or something related with the 1.6 version internal "bios". The only issue with this is that 8G is going out of the market very quickly (local stores around here are bypassing that size for the 16GB) ... so it is necessary to find them online and with shipping and everything they could cost more than the 2G-IOT.

As I have no idea about any compatible LCD for the 2G-IOT, I will find a GPIO based one (it is supposed to be Raspberry Pi compatible ... let's see what happens ...).

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The machine doesn't boot properly with 16GB SD cards because of lack of power (it is not because the card could be damaged or something similar). So, 8G class 10 must be used instead (it seems that as larger the card, bigger the consumption). What I don't know is if this is a hardware design limitation or something related with the 1.6 version internal "bios". The only issue with this is that 8G is going out of the market very quickly (local stores around here are bypassing that size for the 16GB) ... so it is necessary to find them online and with shipping and everything they could cost more than the 2G-IOT.

As I have no idea about any compatible LCD for the 2G-IOT, I will find a GPIO based one (it is supposed to be Raspberry Pi compatible ... let's see what happens ...).

Thats pretty sad. I've also encountered this, but luckily still had 8GB card lying around. Hopefully xunlong makes a rev2 with this and battery support fixed.

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The machine doesn't boot properly with 16GB SD cards because of lack of power (it is not because the card could be damaged or something similar).

It boots on Samsung Evo 16GB and Samsung Evo Plus 16GB for me. Judging by console messages RDA BootROM is very sensitive to the card response timings to different commands, so it's not certain that it will or will not always work on all cards of certain type, brand and capacity.

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It boots on Samsung Evo 16GB and Samsung Evo Plus 16GB for me. Judging by console messages RDA BootROM is very sensitive to the card response timings to different commands, so it's not certain that it will or will not always work on all cards of certain type, brand and capacity.

maybe this could be fixed by putting uboot (or some other compatible loader) to nand and instruct it to continue booting off sd card.

As a side note. Some people in other places were indicating that the power supply used with the machine was "the issue". However I have been using the 2G-IOT with 2A, 3A and even connected to the USB 2.0 port in an Orange Pi Zero and works with all them. The problem is the SD card not the power supply.

I don't have more data by now to check if the Samsung consume less than the SanDisk or Radio Shack cards.

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Well, not entirely true. If a device comes with a Micro USB connector to be powered that is encouraging users to use crappy cables (made for 500mA max with insanely thin cable diameters) and crappy phone or 'smart' chargers (not delivering more than 500mA for example). So powering is always a problem with Micro USB just due to the fact that people are not aware that it's a problem (and while an electrical engineer would never think about stuff like that average users tend to use pretty bad powering equipment as soon as a device is equipped with Micro USB).

Wrt SD cards: Fake/counterfeit cards do exist, are everywhere and it seems to get even worse these days. Every list of 'known cards' is therefore pretty useless unless you find a way to reliably differentiate between fake and genuine cards (I don't know one and the only strategy these days is to buy SD cards from big retailers that refund you without asking questions)

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8G class 10 must be used instead (it seems that as larger the card, bigger the consumption)

Are such assumptions backed by anything or at least some evidence? I mean I run here an OPi Zero 24/7 seeding Armbian torrents with a 128 GB Samsung EVO+ powered by an USB2 port of my router which is known to NOT provide more than 500 mA.

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2G-IOT related thread on 4pda.ru forum and AliExpress reviews for this board will have some data regarding SD cards, but as I said, even a "good" card may not work here if card's controller response timings are slower than BootROM expects them to be.

8 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

So powering is always a problem with Micro USB just due to the fact that people are not aware that it's a problem

microUSB powering (or rather cable and socket) should not affect early boot related issues since the power consumption at boot (w/o initializing wireless, GSM, display with backlight and other powerful consumers) should be low enough, assuming power source quality is good enough.

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On 5/27/2017 at 7:40 AM, malvcr said:
8G class 10 must be used instead (it seems that as larger the card, bigger the consumption)

Are such assumptions backed by anything or at least some evidence? I mean I run here an OPi Zero 24/7 seeding Armbian torrents with a 128 GB Samsung EVO+ powered by an USB2 port of my router which is known to NOT provide more than 500 mA.
Like this

Well ... there are different references about how SD cards behave in different scenarios (SD, not SDD).

The people that has been worried about that is the one uses Arduinos and other types of microcontroller based devices, as they have more "precise" and "narrow" working environments that computer users ... so they try to squeeze the last micro ampere to rescue some hours of battery or to be able to work will just some solar energy.

It has a lot of details about their particular problem, but the following paragraph is a good abstract (it is talking about computing cycles):

Quote

One final note: this is not depending on the speed class of SD-Cards nor their size. Some 8GB cards did it themselves, others not. It's the flash controller
inside that makes the difference. Also for the power consumtion. I won't tell the brand names thogh ...

There "somebody" describes an online comparison where the Lexar 8GB SDHC Card consumes "about 25%-30% of the other" ones. I have been trying to find that "online comparison" but the Internet it is very big :-)

Then it seems that really there is a difference in the power consumption with SD cards (I suppose that also with the SDD disks, but the power supply for an SDD disk go through a different path that for an SD card, so the differences must not to be so critical as to make the booting to fail). But as others (not me) were able to make the 2G-IOT machine to work with 16GB cards, maybe those cards flash controllers do a better job taking care of power. Or really, the synchronization in the RDA Bios has some flaws avoiding several cards not to communicate correctly with the machine.

On the power supply. Yes, I know that good quality cables and good quality power sources are paramount. So it is right to quit the power problem ensuring a quality source of power (I don't say 5A or something like that, ... just the needed power). However, the SD card problem go beyond the external power supply.